Emotional Eating and Binge Eating Treatment

Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating is not about the food

Effective Eating Disorder Treatment leads to intuitive eating, healthy eating, and balanced eating. This requires a strong and healthy connection to Self.

Do you see yourself below?

Emotional Eating is comforting yourself with food. This usually takes the form of carbohydrates. In addition, you might numb yourself with food rather than tolerate unpleasant feelings. Finally, entertaining, celebrating or “treating yourself” with food might be a sign that you are an Emotional Eater.

Binge Eating is eating large amounts of food and feeling out of control. In addition, if you eat compulsively, or secretly, these are indications that your relationship with food is out of balance. Eating when not hungry, eating rapidly, and eating to physical discomfort are all behaviors associated with Binge Eating Disorder. Especially relevant are feelings of shame or guilt that follow a food binge. Often, women struggling with Binge Eating Disorders will compensate by restricting. Restricting, in turn, increases the urge to Binge by triggering the body’s need to compensate for deprivation.

Bulimia is a category of behaviors designed to facilitate the expulsion of food or calories from the body. These behaviors often include self-induced vomiting, laxative abuse, diuretic abuse and over-exercising. The goal of these behaviors is to avoid or mitigate weight gain, to facilitate weight loss and/or to experience the physical release often associated with purging. Often, women struggling with Binge Eating Disorders will attempt to compensate for bingeing with one or more bulimic behaviors.

Binge Eating Disorder Treatment

I provide online therapy for Binge Eating Disorder treatment and Negative Body Image Issues with the same effective approaches that I integrate into all of my therapy practice. Because Eating Disorders and Body Image struggles are symptoms of other issues, it is imperative to address and resolve the underlying distress before it can be possible to experience relief. Disordered eating behaviors are maladaptive coping mechanisms. In order to eliminate the need for the maladaptive coping mechanism, the underlying issues must be resolved, and new healthier coping skills learned in their place.

Bariatric Surgery Patients

The outcomes of bariatric surgeries can be significant — from rapid shifts in physical disease to enormous psychological changes.

However, your health after bariatric surgery requires implementing a “new normal” and making big lifestyle changes. And the most important of these changes is developing a healthy, long-term relationship with food, eating, your body, and the Self.

Because you want to achieve and maintain healthy body weight and function, it is ideal to begin your therapy work prior to bariatric surgery. The goal of therapy is to identify and resolve emotional and psychological issues that contribute to your Disordered Eating behaviors. In some cases, clients have successfully lost enough weight with therapy alone, and decided against surgery. In other cases, clients reduced or eliminated their emotional dependence on food which helped them succeed before and after bariatric surgery.

So, wherever you are in your weight management journey, whether you are gathering information, contemplating your decision, pre-surgery, or post-surgery, I very much look forward to helping you love and appreciate the body and the skin your are in.

Read my GA Voice Interview from June 2020.